A Study On The Traumatic Narration In Going After Cacciato

The Vietnam War was an unforgettable memory of the United States of America in its history.The long-lasting war not only militarily,economically,and politically damaged American national power,but also brought trauma to its people,especially to those Vietnam War soldiers.As one of the Vietnam War trauma victims,Tim O’Brien writes down his Vietnam War experiences.One of his novels,Going After Caccito,received the National Book Award in 1979.The entanglement of present,past,and future is the feature of this novel,making it difficult for readers to reorganize the time order.While the time order in the plots of future is relatively clear,by reorganizing the time order,readers can find that the disorder in plots represents the chaos in Paul Berlin’s mind hurt by war trauma.Moreover,readers can experience the impacts of war trauma better.This novel has attracted wide attention of the critics after its publication for the narrative strategy of the juxtaposition of memories and imagination,and the ambiguous boundary between the reality and the fiction,which is consistent with the symptoms appearing on trauma victims.While attracting reader’s attention to Paul Berlin’s imaginary trip in which he had taken six months and covered 8600 miles to go after the deserter Cacciato,O’Brien turns the imagination into a method of narration to connect the fragmented trauma memories,presents trauma experiences and its influences on readers,and displays a possible way to recover from trauma and achieve self-redemption.Trauma was firstly used as in clinical medicine,but now has been widely used in the cultural field.Therefore,the cultural trauma theory comes into being.Trauma refers to the traumatic emotion after experiencing some destructive affairs.“Trauma” is one of the most important factors in Going After Cacciato.From the perspective of the trauma theory,this research traces the sources of Paul Berlin’s trauma and imagination with the theory of Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology,to analyze the features of imagination used as narrative method to express traumatic memories and the effectiveness of imagination as a medium to heal the trauma.